Why we need to rethink education in the artificial intelligence age

Why we need to rethink education in the artificial intelligence age

Why we need to rethink education in the artificial intelligence age

Artificial intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies (ET) are poised to transform modern society in profound ways. As with electricity in the last century, AI is an enabling technology that will animate everyday products and communications, endowing everything from cars to cameras with the ability to interact with the world around them, and with each other. These developments are just the beginning, and as AI/ET matures, it will have sweeping impacts on our work, security, politics, and very lives.[1]

These technologies are already impacting the world around us, as Darrell West and I wrote in our April 2018 piece “How artificial intelligence is transforming the world,” and I highly recommend that anyone just discovering the topic of AI policy read it thoroughly. There, Darrell and I describe several important implications related to AI/ET, but chief among them is that these technology developments are on the cusp of ushering in a true revolution in human affairs at an increasingly fast pace.

As AI continues to influence and shape existing industries and allows new ones to take root, its macro-level impact, particularly in the realm of economics, will become more and more apparent. Control over the research and development of AI will become increasingly vital, and the winners of this upcoming AI-defined era in human history will be the countries and companies that can create the most powerful algorithms, assemble the most talent, collect the most data, and marshal the most computing power. This is the next great technology race of our generation and the stakes are high, particularly for the United States. If American society is to embrace the full range of social and political changes that these technologies will introduce, CONTINUE READING: Why we need to rethink education in the artificial intelligence age

Author

John R. Allen

President, The Brookings Institution

Editor's Note: 

This report is part of "A Blueprint for the Future of AI," a series from the Brookings Institution that analyzes the new challenges and potential policy solutions introduced by artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

APNewsBreak: Teach for America slammed over Oakland strike #Unite4OaklandKids #WeAreOEA #WeAreCTA #strikeready

APNewsBreak: Teach for America slammed over Oakland strike

APNewsBreak: Teach for America slammed over Oakland strike

Hundreds of Teach for America alumni are slamming the educator placement program for telling members to cross the picket line during a potential teacher strike in Oakland, California, or risk losing thousands of dollars at the end of their service.

More than 300 alumni signed the letter delivered Monday to Teach for America’s leadership, asking it to stop “pressuring” young teachers to break a strike that could come next week.

The Associated Press obtained the letter sent to a nonprofit known for placing high-achieving college graduates without formal teaching training into two-year educator jobs in low-income communities.

Payton Carter, a 1999 Teach for America alumnus and current Oakland teacher, said he was outraged that members may lose an award worth $2,000 to $10,000 — a financial incentive the nonprofit uses as a recruiting tool.

“We feel it’s really unethical and an unfair use of the funding, as basically financial leverage to coerce them into crossing the picket line,” Carter said. “No TFA corps member would willingly do that because of the professional damage to relationships.”

Spokesman Jack Hardy said Teach for America didn’t provide recommendations on what its 58 teachers should do in the school district, where a possible strike would affect 36,000 students. He said there’s a misunderstanding on the guidance it communicated outlining rules from AmeriCorps, a federal service program that bans striking and provides the awards at the end of teachers’ two-year service commitment.

“We don’t have a position on the strike or organizing. Our corp members, we stand behind them, we stand beside them. Our goal is to help them be successful,” Hardy said.

Teach for America has for years faced criticism and skepticism by those who call the education CONTINUE READING: APNewsBreak: Teach for America slammed over Oakland strike

Big Education Ape: Oakland Strike: Support Students and Educators With Bread for Ed – California Educator #Unite4OaklandKids #WeAreOEA #WeAreCTA #strikeready - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/02/oakland-strike-support-students-and.html

Peter Greene: Dear House Democrats: Go Easy on Betsy DeVos - Progressive.org

Dear House Democrats: Go Easy on Betsy DeVos - Progressive.org

Dear House Democrats: Go Easy on Betsy DeVos
I’m not looking for gotcha moments or public chastising of the Secretary, I’m after something larger.

Dear House Democrats,

Congratulations. Now that the celebrating has died down and you’re turning your attention to your new jobs, I want to share an observation about the business of governing.

I hear a lot of enthusiasm for Go After Trump, and it’s hard to argue with putting some pressure on the grifter-in-chief. I’m hoping that you can be selective: it would be impossible to go after every single shady thing he’s done and we should focus on what matters. Foreign nationals funneling money into his personal businesses to influence policy choices: important. Disregarding the intelligence community when it comes to matters of US security: important. Feeding cheeseburgers to football players: not important.

I also understand the urge to Go After Betsy. I’ve read about the committees chomping at the bit to haul in Secretary of Education DeVos. I imagine that it must be tempting to lambaste her while she sits there with that smug expression on her face, generating little YouTube clips that will appear under headlines with words like “slams” and “leaves DeVos speechless.”

I’m suggesting you don’t.

I’m not concerned about her tender sensitivities. She is well-insulated by wealth and her religious faith. You will never say a thing that will bother her in the slightest, and she will never feel a need to explain herself to you.

I’m suggesting that instead, you go after the premises by which she operates.

Most of what DeVos has done, particularly in her rollbacks of existing legislation, is based on a pretty clear principle—business men should be able CONTINUE READING: Dear House Democrats: Go Easy on Betsy DeVos - Progressive.org

Two Los Angeles Teachers Examine Their Superintendent, Austin Beutner - Living in Dialogue #UTLAStrong #WeAreLA #REDFORED

Two Los Angeles Teachers Examine Their Superintendent, Austin Beutner - Living in Dialogue

Two Los Angeles Teachers Examine Their Superintendent, Austin Beutner

As the dust settles on the 6-day UTLA strike, we can see education policy in the City of Los Angeles with fresh perspectives and fresh options. The demands of Los Angeles teachers were supported by an overwhelming majority of parents, students, and community members. Lower class sizes, as well as more counselors and nurses, are appealing to these groups: the LAUSD stakeholders.

The strike brought national attention to the leadership of both LAUSD and UTLA. As LAUSD teachers, we joined picket lines and marched in rallies 50,000 strong. Our strike, and the support our strike enjoyed throughout Los Angeles, won us the best contract of our careers. It is a contract that will benefit students from this point forward. The strike is also paying dividends beyond Los Angeles. Nationwide, Democrats who may have previously supported charter schools are now rethinking their position. And teachers in other unions across the state and the nation are considering their own job actions. So our faith in the leadership of UTLA is strong.

However, we have a few remarks on the leadership and job performance of Austin Beutner, the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

A school superintendent is expected to support the needs of a district’s stakeholders: the students, the parents, the district’s employees, and the larger community. Successful superintendents are attuned to their stakeholders. Austin Beutner’s pre-strike dismissal of UTLA’s classroom-based demands may have seemed out of character for a school superintendent, but less so when viewed through the lens of the man’s pre-LAUSD career. That is a career that catered to a different group: the shareholder. Beutner’s inability to read the pulse of Los Angeles came because he has never answered to its stakeholders. His inability to discern between the perspective of stakeholders and the perspective of shareholders is what brought on the strike. It is what has made Austin Beutner’s 9-month reign over LAUSD the failure it has been. And it is Exhibit A in the case for his immediate dismissal.

The majority of school district superintendents follow a career arc something like this: first teacher, then administrator, then district assistant-of-something, and finally superintendent. Along the way, this path instills in the individual deep desire for buy-in.  From the classroom to the boardroom, nothing happens without a leader who values people trusting their vision and who is skilled enough to earn that trust. Being able to read a room full of stakeholders, whether they are students, parents, teachers, community, or school CONTINUE READING: Two Los Angeles Teachers Examine Their Superintendent, Austin Beutner - Living in Dialogue

Newsom names new head of State Board of Education in California | EdSource

Newsom names new head of State Board of Education in California | EdSource
Newsom names new head of State Board of Education in California
Linda Darling-Hammond to succeed Michael Kirst on powerful state education body

n his first State of the State speech Tuesday morning, Gov. Gavin Newsom named Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor emeritus and one of the nation’s most prominent education researchers, to head California’s State Board of Education.

“Thank you for doing this, Linda,” Newsom said in his speech, in which he noted the multiple problems facing the state’s schools, referring to “understaffed schools, overcrowded classrooms, pension pressures, the achievement gap, and  charter schools growth.”

Newsom added:  “The stressors are showing up all over the state.”

Darling-Hammond, who currently chairs the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, will succeed another Stanford professor emeritus, Michael Kirst, who led the state board during Jerry Brown’s first terms as governor, as well as his last two terms. Kirst, a close advisor to Brown for over four decades on education matters, decided to step down from the board in December at the end of Brown’s four terms as governor.

Darling-Hammond and Kirst have been close collaborators, and in fact live within blocks of each other adjoining the Stanford campus. She will be the first African-American woman to head the 11-person board, which plays a key role in CONTINUE READING: Newsom names new head of State Board of Education in California | EdSource

Betsy DeVos Is PROFITING Off Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parents - The Ring of Fire Network

Betsy DeVos Is PROFITING Off Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parents - The Ring of Fire Network

Betsy DeVos Is PROFITING Off Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parents

According to reports, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been making huge profits by the family separation policies of the Trump Administration. The reports show that DeVos is invested heavily in adoption agency corporations that have been receiving and adopting out the migrant children that are being separated from their parents at the border. Everything this administration does is about the money, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently, the Trump administration told us that some of the thousands of children that they separated from their parents at the border and sent off to adoption agencies who then place them with sponsor families, uh, thousands of them. It’s just too difficult to track them down to reunite them with their family. We just, we can’t do that. We don’t have the technology. I mean we have the technology back in the sixties to send human beings to the moon and get them home safely, but caught reuniting a child in the digital age with their parents. It is a step too far for this administration that seems wholly incompetent and that incompetence is 100 percent by design. This administration had no concern for returning these kids to their parents. They wanted to send a message to the rest of the world that if you come over here, we’re going to make your life a living hell.

We’re going to ruin your life. We’re going to take away your kids. You’ll probably never get them back. So you better think twice about coming here and there. Little plan there has backfired. Well, at least for everybody, except for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, because as it turns out, Betsy DeVos, as she has with every other aspect of her life, is profiting hugely off the separation of families at the border being perpetrated by the CONTINUE READING: Betsy DeVos Is PROFITING Off Separating Migrant Kids From Their Parents - The Ring of Fire Network

How NCLB is Still Destroying Reading for Children 

How NCLB is Still Destroying Reading for Children 

How NCLB is Still Destroying Reading for Children

NCLB was a bi-partisan bill signed into law in 2002 during the Bush administration’s push for school reform.

We now recognize how punitive the bill was, its troubling use of one-size-fits-all standardized testing to demonize and close public schools, the punitive AYP and “highly qualified” teacher credentialing changes, the unrealistic predictions that all children would be proficient in reading by 2014, and the push for unproven charters and choice.

NCLB also created terrible changes when it came to reading instruction, and the impacts are still felt today by children across the country.

Many parents and educators have forgotten, or never heard of, Reading First, NCLB’s reading program which was an abysmal failure. Kappan Washington columnist Anne C. Lewis called it “the U.S. Department of Education’s ‘little Enron’ scandal.”

They continue to embrace the recommendations by the same individuals who were connected to failed NCLB policy and the scandalous Reading First initiative!

They subscribe to harmful ideology that claims children must read early, preferably in kindergarten, or they are failures, and that teachers and their education schools don’t know the right way or the “science” to teach reading.

Teachers and their ed. schools are blamed when kindergartners don’t show up in first CONTINUE READING: How NCLB is Still Destroying Reading for Children 

PBS News Hour Opinion: Why I am celebrating ‘Black Lives Matter at School’ – I AM AN EDUCATOR

PBS News Hour Opinion: Why I am celebrating ‘Black Lives Matter at School’ – I AM AN EDUCATOR

PBS News Hour Opinion: Why I am celebrating ‘Black Lives Matter at School’

Jesse Hagopian wrote this short article for the PBS News Hour about our hugely successful Black Lives Matter Week of Action. Photos by Sharon H. Chang.

PBS News Hour Education Feb 8, 2019 7:20 PM EST

I don’t think I’ve ever been emotionally moved by a robocall, but there’s a first time for everything.

On Sunday night I got a call from my sons’ elementary school. When I answered, the recorded voice of the principal began speaking. She was calling to let all the parents know that the teachers would be participating in the national “Black Lives Matter At School” week, and that parents should ask their kids about what they were learning.

How it grew

The story of Black Lives Matter At School starts with one school in Seattle in the autumn of 2016. John Muir Elementary had been engaging in conversations and staff trainings around equity and race for years. During the end-of-summer professional development, in the aftermath of the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, school staff read and discussed an article on #BlackLivesMatter and renewed their commitment to working for racial justice.

In support of this work, DeShawn Jackson, an African-American male student support worker, helped organize the group “Black Men Uniting to Change the Narrative” for an event at the school to celebrate black students.

The school’s art teacher wanted to show that John Muir staff supported this celebration of Black students, and so she designed a shirt for educators to wear that said, “Black Lives Matter/We Stand Together/John Muir Elementary.”

A backlash erupted when it was reported in the local news that the teachers would be wearing the #BlackLivesMatter shirts. The school began to receive hateful email, and then the unthinkable happened: A bomb threat was made against the school. In response, the school district officially cancelled the event, which made it smaller than it would have been, but the staff carried out the celebration anyway.

“The bomb-sniffing dogs found nothing and school was kept open that day. The CONTINUE READING: PBS News Hour Opinion: Why I am celebrating ‘Black Lives Matter at School’ – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Educators Endorse Safety Measures – Not Arming Teachers | Education News | US News

Educators Endorse Safety Measures – Not Arming Teachers | Education News | US News

Educators Endorse Safety Measures – Not Arming Teachers
A report by teachers groups and gun-safety advocates says guns would be ineffective in schools.

THE TWO NATIONAL teachers union and a leading gun safety group called on federal and state lawmakers to pass a variety of gun laws to prevent future school shootings as part of a school safety report released Monday.

The report, published by Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, comes just days before Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, marks one year since a mass shooting in which a former student killed 17 children and adults.

KEEPING OUR SCHOOLS SAFE: A PLAN TO STOP MASS SHOOTINGS AND END GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS -https://everytownresearch.org/documents/2019/02/keeping-our-schools-safe.pdf

"It's been now almost a year since Parkland," said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. "I know students served as live witness to that tragedy, and their voices helped make 2018 the year of gun safety.

"There's still a significant amount of work to be done," he said. "It's up to us to solve this problem."

The school safety report stands in stark contrast to the one published by the White House's Federal Commission on School Safety in December, which recommended the Department of Education scrap Obama-era guidance aimed at reducing the number of students of color who are disciplined – a move that ignited a firestorm among civil rights groups.

The White House report also called for schools to consider arming school personnel – an idea that President Donald Trump floated in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shooting but one CONTINUE READING: Educators Endorse Safety Measures – Not Arming Teachers | Education News | US News

‘Future of Unions’ conference speakers push sectoral bargaining – People's World

‘Future of Unions’ conference speakers push sectoral bargaining – People's World

‘Future of Unions’ conference speakers push sectoral bargaining

WASHINGTON—-What was supposed to be an intellectual weekend conference on the future of the U.S. union movement turned into a conference on the future of collective bargaining, and specifically the promotion of sectoral bargaining, instead.

The Feb. 8-9 confab in D.C., hosted by the Albert Shanker Institute – a think-tank the Teachers (AFT) set up – and the Century Foundation saw a wide range of speakers, both from the U.S. and abroad try to tackle the issue of how U.S. unions could reverse their long downward slide in the private sector.

That slide has taken U.S. private-sector union density to 6.4 percent, according to the latest federal figures – and set unions’ right-wing foes, their corporate class cronies and their political puppets free to go after public-sector unions now.

So far, despite some small losses, they haven’t succeeded, leaders of the four top public sector unions – AFT President Randi Weingarten, AFSCME President Lee Saunders, Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry and National Education Association Vice President Becky Pringle – said in a separate panel.

That’s despite a hostile U.S. Supreme Court which, in last year’s Janus decision by the court’s 5-man GOP-named majority, made every public worker in the U.S. eventually a potential “free rider,” eligible to use union services and gains without paying one red cent for them. But that’s another story.

That left speakers wrestling with the question of revitalizing and expanding private-sector union density. While the conference was not designed to come to a conclusion, but instead to float and discuss ideas, said Leo Casey of the Shanker Institute, sectoral bargaining came to the fore.

But it isn’t the only way private-sector unions could expand, many speakers, including Weingarten, Communications Workers President Chris Shelton, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., argued that “bargaining for the community” – by putting community causes at the head of the workers’ demands – leads to more worker power.

They specifically cited the successful strikes which governments’ actions, and inactions, forced on teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, and Los Angeles. There, the teachers mobilized parents and students in united fronts by emphasizing raising the funding and quality of the schools for everyone’s kids, ahead of pay and pensions. They also tied those into quality, too, arguing that if teachers are better-paid, they stay in their jobs, or don’t have to take second jobs to survive.

Weingarten argued private-sector unions could learn from those successful teachers’ strikes. CONTINUE READING: ‘Future of Unions’ conference speakers push sectoral bargaining – People's World

Denver teachers take to the picket line to protest inadequate pay #DCTAstrong #RedforEd #edcolo #coleg #copolitics #FairPayForTeachers

Denver teachers take to the picket line to protest inadequate pay
Denver teachers are next to take to the picket line
A bonus system cannot replace a higher base pay

Denver high school social studies teacher Nick Childers, right, chants as teachers picket outside South High School on February 11, 2019 in Denver, Colorado. Denver teachers are striking for the first time in 25 years after the school district and the union representing the educators failed to reach an agreement after 14 months of contract negations over teacher pay. Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images

In an era of fractured politics, teachers of different ethnicities, with varying levels of seniority, in school districts big and small, in both Democratic and Republican states, seem unified on at least one front: They are not being paid as they should. Over the last two years, insufficient pay was at the core of statewide disputes in Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Colorado and Washington State. The high-profile teachers’ strike of the Los Angeles Unified School District less than a month ago was a clarion call for other big city districts. Now we can add Denver to the growing list of places where teachers are taking their pay demands to the picket line.

After Colorado Governor Jared Polis declined to enter into negotiations between the union and district, the leaders of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association union (DCTA) announced its members would strike on February 11. So on Monday, Denver teachers hit the streets.

While the district and DCTA argue over the amount of the raise, they both agree that teachers need one. Teacher pay continues to lag behind the pay of other college-educated workers, according to a 2016 report published by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. The report found: “In 2015, public school teachers’ weekly wages were 17.0 percent lower than those of comparable workers — compared with just 1.8 percent lower in 1994.” Expect to see more strikes, particularly in cities like Denver, where a tech boom has increased the cost of living for all workers.

What is creating an impasse is the taxpayer-funded Denver Public CONTINUE READING: Denver teachers take to the picket line to protest inadequate pay

CURMUDGUCATION: NY: Parents Call For Charter Pause and Evaluation

CURMUDGUCATION: NY: Parents Call For Charter Pause and Evaluation
NY: Parents Call For Charter Pause and Evaluation

NYC school district's parent board has come out in opposition to raising New York's charter school cap. Will Governor Cuomo hear them?

The New York City schools are under mayoral control (never, ever, an ideal system), so they have no school boards. What they do have is thirty-six Community Education Councils composed of elected parents. Those CECs in turn have an Education Council Consortium, composed of representatives from each of the CECs. Their stated purpose is "to address issues that affect schools and communities throughout all the boroughs and meets regularly with the Chancellor to help shape, advise, provide feedback and comment on educational policies, visions and goals."

Time to check his hearing.

The CECs are more like a community school board than, say, a PTA, and they have been known to get feisty and vocal. Last fall they wrote to the state legislature to ask the mayoral power over NYC schools be "reined in."

Now the ECC has issued a unanimous statement about both the charter cap and the subcap (the cap for the state and for the city, respectively). The resolution, passed last Saturday (Feb 9) is heavy on the whereas, but it has some strong points to make:

The resolution characterizes charters in New York  as a "charter experiment" or the "unproven experiment" and describes New York City as "oversaturated" with charter schools (NYC has 39% of the state's students, but 71% of the state's charter schools). Noting that the city also has plenty of private and public options, the resolution asserts that NYC "is demonstrably not a region with a lack of alternatives as originally contemplated" in the original charter law. Meanwhile, other parts of the state have few or zero charters. If choice is so important, the resolution suggests, why aren't  CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: NY: Parents Call For Charter Pause and Evaluation

Denver Strike: Teachers Protest Low Pay and “Corporate Reform” Innovations that Didn’t Work | janresseger #DCTAstrong #RedforEd #edcolo #coleg #copolitics #FairPayForTeachers

Denver Strike: Teachers Protest Low Pay and “Corporate Reform” Innovations that Didn’t Work | janresseger
Denver Strike: Teachers Protest Low Pay and “Corporate Reform” Innovations that Didn’t Work

The Denver Classroom Teachers Association went on strike yesterday against the Denver Public Schools over low pay and what has become a failed experiment in merit pay bonuses.  Schoolteachers want the district to scrap its ProComp incentive pay system, which was put in place in 2006 when teachers agreed to the plan—a fixture of then-Superintendent Michael Bennet’s corporate school reformer agenda.  Bennet now a U.S. Senator, served as Denver’s school-reformer superintendent from 2005 until 2009. He was the mayor’s chief of staff and formerly an investment banker who lacked any experience in education.

Denver’s teachers’ strike is the latest in a yearlong wave of walkouts by teachers—a state-by-state cry for help from a profession of hard-working, dedicated public servants disgusted with despicable working conditions, lack of desperately needed services for their students, and insultingly low pay. This time, however, an added issue is a twelve-year experiment with corporate reformer innovation in the form of a bonus pay system supposedly to incentivize teachers to work harder and smarter. Today teachers claim the innovation didn’t work, because too much money went into bonuses at the expense of base pay.

For the NY Times, Julie Turkewitz and Dana Goldstein explain why Denver’s teachers are striking: “Pay-for-performance models like Denver’s offer teachers bonuses for raising student achievement and for taking on tougher assignments, such as in schools with many students from low-income families.”  Denver teachers, write Turkewitz and Goldstein, “say this model-once hailed as a way to motivate teachers—has delivered erratic bonuses while their base salaries stagnate amid rising living costs… The foundational principle of Pro-Comp—evaluating teachers according to how well their students perform—was later enshrined in Colorado law and then in Race to the Top…. But such evaluation models typically required more testing of students in order to gather evidence of teacher impact…. Since 2016, federal and state laws have shifted districts away from using student performance to judge teachers. In many ways, ProComp is now seen as a relic of an earlier era of school reform.”

The Denver Post‘s Elizabeth Hernandez reports that the school district’s negotiators agreed to CONTINUE READING: Denver Strike: Teachers Protest Low Pay and “Corporate Reform” Innovations that Didn’t Work | janresseger

'Performance pay’ drove Denver teachers to strike -- and it is failing in other districts, too. #DCTAstrong #RedforEd #edcolo #coleg #copolitics #FairPayForTeachers - The Washington Post

'Performance pay’ drove Denver teachers to strike -- and it is failing in other districts, too. A North Carolina teacher explains why it doesn’t work. - The Washington Post

'Performance pay’ drove Denver teachers to strike -- and it is failing in other districts, too. A North Carolina teacher explains why it doesn’t work.

Denver teachers are out on strike, protesting the system of performance pay -- also known as merit pay -- used by Denver Public Schools. Once widely supported in Denver, teachers now say the 14-year-old system is confusing and leaves them without knowing exactly how much money they will make each year.

Performance pay is one of those ideas that rises and fades in cycles of school reforms over decades. It may sound as if it makes sense — giving more money to teachers deemed the best — but research has repeatedly shown that it doesn’t work for a number of reasons.

In 2011, I ran this post by researcher Esther Quintero, who wrote:

The current teacher salary scale has come under increasing fire in the modern school reform area — and not without reason. Systems where people are treated more or less the same suffer from two basic problems. There will always be “free riders,” and relatedly, others may feel their contributions are not sufficiently recognized. So what are good alternatives? Based on decades worth of economic and psychological research, measures such as merit pay are not the answer.

Although individual pay for performance (or merit pay) is a widespread practice among U.S. businesses, the research on its effectiveness shows it to be of limited utility (see here, here, here, and here), mostly because it is easy for its benefits to be swamped by unintended consequences.

Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch has written about it repeatedly too:

It is curious that teachers vigorously oppose merit pay, even though they are the ones who are supposed to reap the rewards. What do they know? They know that merit pay undermines collaboration and teamwork. They know that it corrupts the culture of the school.

In this post, veteran North Carolina teacher Justin Parmenter explains why it isn’t working in North Carolina. Parmenter teaches seventh-grade language arts at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte. He is a fellow with Hope Street Group’s North Carolina Teacher Voice Network. He started his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Albania and taught in Istanbul. He was a finalist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teacher of the year in 2016. This appeared on his blog (and he gave me permission to publish it). You can find him on Twitter here.

By Justin Parmenter

“I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.” -- Harvard economist Roland Fryer

A few years ago, Harvard University economist Roland Fryer set out to learn whether the New York City Department of Education’s distribution of $75 million to teachers who met performance targets in 200 high-need schools actually led to better outcomes for students. His research determined that it didn’t. Not only CONTINUE READING: 'Performance pay’ drove Denver teachers to strike -- and it is failing in other districts, too. A North Carolina teacher explains why it doesn’t work. - The Washington Post